If you dodged an accessibility lawsuit because you have physical locations, what does it mean when those physical locations close?

Good question.

As movie theaters, restaurant ordering, college courses, and more move to online-first delivery, the notion of a corresponding brick-and-mortar venue falls away. If the current pandemic physical distancing measures stretch into the next year as many think, then this blip becomes the de facto new normal.

A look at the trend towards larger and larger font sizes for body copy on the web, culminating with Resilient Web Design.

There are some good arguments here for the upper limit on the font size there being too high, so I’ve adjusted it slightly. Now on large screens, the body copy on Resilient Web Design is 32px (2 times 1em), down from 40px (2.5 times 1em).

If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!

This does a really good job of describing the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation …but I don’t buy the conclusion: I don’t think that feature detection equates to graceful degradation. I do agree though that, when it comes to JavaScript, the result of progressive enhancement is that the language degrades gracefully.

This is progressive enhancement. An approach to making interfaces that ensures JavaScript degrades gracefully—something that HTML and CSS do automatically.

But there’s a difference between something degrading gracefully (the result) and graceful degradation (the approach).

Don’t write fopen when you can write openFile. Write throwValidationError and not throwVE. Call that name function and not fct. That’s German naming convention. Do this and your readers will appreciate it.

I strongly feel that metadata that is separated from the user-visible data associated with it highly susceptible to metadata partial copy-paste necrosis. User-visible text is also developer-visible text. When devs copy/ paste that, it’s very easy to forget to copy any associated metadata that’s not interleaved, leading to errors.

Living things are just a better way for nature to dissipate energy and increase the universe’s entropy.

No anthropocentric exceptionalism here; just the laws of thermodynamics.

According to the inevitable life theory, biological systems spontaneously emerge because they more efficiently disperse, or “dissipate” energy, thereby increasing the entropy of the surroundings. In other words, life is thermodynamically favorable.

As a consequence of this fact, something that seems almost magical happens, but there is nothing supernatural about it. When an inanimate system of particles, like a group of atoms, is bombarded with flowing energy (such as concentrated currents of electricity or heat), that system will often self-organize into a more complex configuration—specifically an arrangement that allows the system to more efficiently dissipate the incoming energy, converting it into entropy.

I saw Daniel give a talk at Async where he compared linguistic rules with code style:

We find the prescriptive rules hard to follow, irrespective of how complex they are, because they are invented, arbitrary, and often go against our intuition. The descriptive rules, on the other hand, are easy to follow because they are instinctive. We learned to follow them as children by listening to, analysing and mimicking speech, armed with an inbuilt concept of the basic building blocks of grammar. We follow them subconsciously, often without even knowing the rules exists.

Thus began some thorough research into trying to uncover a universal grammar for readable code:

I am excited by the possibility of discovering descriptive readability rules, and last autumn I started an online experiment to try and find some. My experiment on howreadable.com compared various coding patterns against each other in an attempt to objectively measure their readability. I haven’t found any strong candidates for prescriptive rules so far, but the results are promising and suggest a potential way forward.

I highly recommend reading through this and watching the video of the Async talk (and conference organisers; get Daniel on your line-up!).